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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/29596518">et quand vient le soir (pour qu'un ciel flamboie)</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/nostradamusO/pseuds/nostradamusO'>nostradamusO</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>The Martian (2015), The Martian - All Media Types, The Martian - Andy Weir</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>3rd person pov, Beth Johanssen is also a nerd, Brief Mild Angst, Chris Beck is a nerd, F/M, Fluff, Johanbeck - Freeform, a lot of softness, but it’s not inter-personal angst, good thing we didn’t have to find out, how lewis found out, lewis's pov, mostly just them talking about the future in the middle of the night, night before the presupply, personally don’t think beth couldn’t carried out the backup plan, they are both nerds, this is just beck and johanssen being cuties for 3k words</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-02-21</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-02-21</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-16 01:47:46</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>3,130</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/29596518</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/nostradamusO/pseuds/nostradamusO</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>“What are you gonna do, when we’re back on Earth?”<br/>“I’m going to tell [my grandfather] about this girl I met, who’s the best person I know and the coolest nerd ever, and that I want to spend my life with her, and I’m going to ask if the offer for my grandma’s ring still stands.”<br/>AKA the story of how Lewis found out. Set the night before the resupply.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Beth Johanssen &amp; Melissa Lewis, Chris Beck &amp; Melissa Lewis, Chris Beck/Beth Johanssen</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>17</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>68</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>et quand vient le soir (pour qu'un ciel flamboie)</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Sometimes I forget that there are people in this world who haven’t read the book and missed out on the “Don’t tell anyone I liked it” response to “Don’t tell anyone I did that” and the eNTIRE BUNKING ARRANGEMENT SCENE. Sure, there’s a deleted scene and it’s adorable, and it DOES include god-among-men Rick Martinez being a little shit, but it does NOT include his glorious “Million-mile-high club!” and that’s a crime. We were ROBBED.</p><p>And yes, it was completely necessary to write this from Lewis’s POV. Outside POV stories are my crack and I am enabling myself. So that’s why this happened. That along with the fact that I didn’t want to do my homework.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Melissa Lewis knew from the day she met them that she should keep an eye on Christopher Beck and Elizabeth Johanssen. Even if she didn’t believe their close relationship would become an issue. Or at least not any more of an issue than Watney and Martinez’s bromance was. </p><p>(The only real difference between the two was that Beck and Johanssen were significantly less work to deal with than Watney and Martinez, and never gave her migraines.)</p><p>Still, she kept it in the back of her head, just in case. She watched them grow toward each other, watched Johanssen crawl out of her shell and start to connect with the entire crew. She still didn’t think it would become an issue.</p><p>Then she watched them fire themselves into space, where they drifted even closer—but still not concerningly so. And not in a way that could be proven as non-platonic. </p><p>Meanwhile, the resident bromance just got more annoying.</p><p>(It seemed, at times, that Vogel was the only functioning member of her crew.)</p><p>The two pairs often collided; Watney and Martinez loved to tease, and thought themselves high-quality comedians. Melissa spent <em> eight months </em> with that in a <em> small ship </em> in <em> space </em> with no way to escape other than walking out an airlock.</p><p>Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on who you asked), the immature jokes went right over the heads of their victims. This was astounding to Melissa for two reasons:</p><ol>
<li>Beck and Johanssen were geniuses.</li>
<li>Watney and Martinez were idiots, and not subtle. </li>
</ol><p>Then Watney was dead for a while, and that put a damper on the jokes.</p><p>(“Hey, Martinez, if Watney’s dead, does that mean you win all your bets with him by default?” Beck said one night; a desperate attempt to make someone, anyone, smile.</p><p>Martinez had grinned. It was brief. But it was there.)</p><p>For a few months, Melissa tried to carry her own grief as well as her crew’s, while managing a work schedule that divided Watney’s tasks between the five of them. Then, he was alive, and she was drowning in guilt. She <em>left him</em> <em>behind</em> and could do nothing to save him. </p><p>Except—she could. The decision was mutiny, but unanimous. They were going back to Mars for the idiot who got himself impaled by an antenna and stuck on a desolate planet. </p><p>Perhaps it is all of these things put together; a whirlwind of stress and fear and busyness; that cause Beck and Johanssen to fall off her radar, even if not for long.</p><p>But long enough.</p><p>And she’s ashamed to admit (and likely never will, not out loud) that it could have been longer. And she’s ashamed to say that she doesn’t come to the conclusion on her own. There’s no illuminating realization, no finishing a puzzle made of soft smile and lingering stare pieces; brushing hands and sitting too close.</p><p>Instead, they get careless, and she has a sleepless night.</p><p>(She wonders if anyone on her crew will sleep soundly tonight.</p><p>She wonders if they all die tomorrow. Johanssen <em> could </em>survive. But would she want to? </p><p>Melissa wouldn’t. She doesn’t think herself capable of following an order like the one she’s given to Johanssen. </p><p>She wonders if that’s a good or bad thing.)</p><p>She goes to the med bay for a sleeping pill. But there’s already someone there; she hears a voice as she approaches that stops her before she reaches the entrance.</p><p>“I’m scared.” It’s a whisper, but there’s nothing else to hear in space, and sometimes that makes the quietest of things seem so loud. Still, she’s never heard Johanssen sound that small.</p><p>She didn’t know <em> small </em> could be heard.</p><p>The color of her voice is devastating, so utterly hopeless and afraid and everything that Melissa has never known Beth Johanssen to be. It’s horrible to hear, and she almost can’t make sense of it in her head, fit together the person she’s known with the voice that’s whispering, cracking, in the dark.</p><p>(She can’t imagine how Beth is hurting, now. How the weight of tomorrow and the oncoming grief and what she’s been asked to do must be bearing on her shoulders. </p><p>And it hits her, sudden and hard, just how <em> young </em> Beth is. She’s still just a girl, barely twenty-nine. She’s supposed to have a whole life ahead of her. </p><p>Melissa knows she jokes sometimes about how managing the Ares III crew is like raising children, but she doesn’t <em> have </em> children, and doesn’t plan to. Beth was only twenty-four when they met, and she kicked and fought as Melissa pulled her under her wing. Beth is as close to a daughter as she’ll have. </p><p>She’s okay with that.</p><p>She loves the tiny spitfire-y ball of caffeine and bright eyes, and thinks that the girl needs her just a little; needs the love and support that the Ares III family has shown her. Melissa is <em> so glad </em> that she’s been able to provide that.</p><p>It breaks something in her, watching it fall apart.)</p><p>“That’s okay,” another voice says, just as quiet in the dark room. The only light comes from a sun-lamp in the corner that stays dimly lit through the night to shine on Watney’s plants that they’ve all been caring for—until he gets back. (He <em> will </em> get back. He will.) “But it’s going to be okay.”</p><p>Melissa has spent years with her crew. She <em> knows </em>them—can tell who’s approaching by the sound pattern of their walk, can read a report and figure out who wrote it. </p><p>She can identify their voices, even when they’re quiet and even when they’re far away.</p><p>It’s now that she realizes she hasn’t been worrying about them for a while.</p><p>She should’ve been, because it seems that in the months where everything was happening at the same time and she couldn’t untangle it all, she was distracted enough to not notice them pulling closer. To not notice something she didn’t expect to need to worry about.</p><p>Distracted enough that when she stands against the frame of the airlock door outside the med bay and leans her upper body to the right to see them cross-legged in front of a background of stars, a large glass window, facing each other, knees touching and hands tangled in his lap, she’s a little surprised.</p><p>There’s a blanket wrapped around Beth’s shoulders with her hood over the top instead of tucked under, like she’d been wearing it but took it off. Melissa thinks that here, in the dark, with her hair down and tucked behind her ears and no hood drooping over her forehead, she has never seen Beth more clearly; though she can barely see her. </p><p>She can barely see him either. (Outer-space is dark without the lights turned on.)</p><p>“You don’t know that.”</p><p>“Yes, I do. You ran the numbers—something like one in three-hundred-seventy-three million? We’re going to be okay.”</p><p>“I can’t—” Melissa feels suddenly like she’s intruding on something she should not see as Beth chokes on her words “—<em>Chris</em>—I <em> can’t</em>—”</p><p>“Beth. <em> Beth</em>,” he says, pulling her hands closer and pressing her palms flat over his chest, over his heartbeat. A grounding technique; he’s ever the doctor, the caretaker.</p><p>(<em>Chris. Beth. </em> It sounds odd to Melissa, who knows more people by their last names than she does by their firsts. These people, too.</p><p>But it also doesn’t sound odd, or stilted, like first names always do just after the switch is flipped; last to first, formal to informal, co-worker to friend.</p><p>Johanssen to Beth. Beck to Chris.</p><p>Maybe they’ve been saying it for a while, but Melissa isn’t ready to confront those implications.)</p><p>When she’s breathing again, Beth’s chin lifts and she finds his eyes. Even from here, in the almost-dark, Melissa can see his so soft, so gentle smile and it shifts something inside her. It pushes away—not fully, but enough—the part of her that feared their relationship would be physical, or something that wouldn’t last. Just a searching for comfort in the midst of this mess.</p><p><em> “Hey,” </em> he whispers.</p><p><em> “Hi.” </em> Her forehead falls against his chin. It’s a beautiful picture that Melissa knows she shouldn’t have seen. This moment isn’t something to be witnessed from the outside. But she stays.</p><p>She fears, and she worries, and she needs to make sure her crew will be okay. It’s her <em> duty</em>, and that is sacredly important to her. Tomorrow, a hastily-made probe will determine whether they live or die. There’s not much she can do to make that knowledge any easier. No one on her ship will be <em> okay </em> right now.</p><p>She watches him press a long kiss to the top of her head. For a moment, they just breathe together. This is perhaps another moment, Melissa thinks, that she should walk away.</p><p>She stays.</p><p>Maybe it’s her sense of concern, but maybe curiosity, as well. Either way, she stays, tucked in a corner just outside the med bay, where she can see two people who aren’t ready to die, only slightly more solid than silhouettes in front of a window into deep space, lit by pinpricks of stars.</p><p>“I don’t wanna die.” Beth’s shoulders deflate as the words come out of her, like they were taking up space in her chest and pushing them out has left empty space behind to cave in under the weight of her bones.</p><p>Chris shifts his weight and pulls her closer until she melts against his chest, her small frame encompassed by his. They fold together into one silhouette.</p><p>“You won’t; you’ll be okay. No matter what happens, you’ll be okay. That’s why I’m okay.”</p><p>“I <em> won’t </em> be. I would <em> never </em> be okay again.”</p><p>“Maybe,” Chris admits, his voice soft. It’s a conversation held in whispers. “But you’re the strongest person I know, and you can endure this.”</p><p>“I don’t want to.” It comes out like a confession. Maybe it is, or maybe it’s a sentence. “If you die, if <em> all of you </em> die, and Lewis asks…” </p><p>She trails off, doesn’t want to say the words. (Melissa hadn’t wanted to suggest them.)</p><p>“I’ll take a pill too. I can’t survive like that. I <em> won’t</em>." The words sit heavy in the air like grief. Melissa wonders if Beth is grieving for herself, or for him; for the entire crew. Maybe it’s just grieving. All-consuming/encompassing. There’s so much to mourn.</p><p>For a long minute, the pair sit in silence. The certainty in Beth’s voice leaves no room for argument. (Melissa doesn’t know what would be argued, anyway.)</p><p>The conversation seems to have ended in the middle. She starts to leave, without the sleeping aid she’d come down for. Maybe that’s for the best. </p><p>“I guess tomorrow has to go well, then,” Chris says, barely more than a murmur against Beth’s hair, and Melissa pauses. “‘Cause I’ve got some plans that won’t work if we’re dead.”</p><p>Her laugh is abrupt and bright; not loud, but fills the hollow room nevertheless. Melissa leans the side of her forehead against the wall and smiles. The mood change is precarious, though, and she doubts it’ll last. (She can hope, though.)</p><p>“Me too,” Beth whispers, and it’s dark in the room and especially in their corner, but still light enough that Melissa can her almost fragile smile, pressed against his collarbone. “I’m gonna get real coffee and eat a whole pizza—no sharing. Wha’bout you?”</p><p>She’s tired. Melissa can hear it even if she can’t see it. Beth’s words have started to slur into each other, just a bit, and her diction is slipping. </p><p>‘Tired’ is a trait that never showed itself in Beth Johanssen before they boarded the Hermes, because on Earth, she had coffee. So much coffee. Melissa can remember the many attempts Chris had made over their time in training to at least convince her to cut the caffeine intake a little bit. He always seemed a little stressed about it, and she seemed to find that amusing.</p><p>Caffeine, however, is uncommon in space. There’s no such thing as ‘good coffee’ on the Hermes. So the crew’s introduction to sleepy Beth Johanssen is fairly new. (And endearing.)</p><p>She looks so very soft like this, folded into Chris’s lap with her head tucked under his chin, hands curled in her lap and holding onto one of his, her fingers drawing circles around his knuckles and tracing the lines on his palm. <em> How doesn’t that tickle? </em> Melissa wonders.</p><p>“My ‘back on Earth’ plans aren’t as delicious as yours,” he says. “But to me they’re just as important.”</p><p>For millions of miles in every direction, they’re surrounded by stars. Earth is close below but still looks far away, glowing outside the window—a view most people will never see. A view that pictures can never do justice. They sit less than three feet from a window that looks down at the planet they’re wanting to go home to, and beyond it, billions and billions of stars. </p><p>He’s looking at her.</p><p>She’s looking at their hands, threaded together on her leg, and she looks more at peace than Melissa thought would be possible tonight.</p><p>“Tell me about them?” Beth murmurs, letting her eyes fall shut. Chris says something back, so close to her temple that the words aren’t clear from where Melissa stands behind the door. She’ll never find out what they were; she’ll always wonder. (But they make Beth smile.)</p><p>She doesn’t think she’ll ever tell them about the conversation she saw, that she shouldn’t have seen, the night before they catch the Taiyang Shen probe.</p><p>“First, I’m going to find a way to sneak a pizza into JSC, because we’ll be stuck there for a while,” he starts, and she makes a little displeased noise—likely at the prospect of being quarantined and poked and prodded like a science project for at <em> least </em> a month, not about the pizza.</p><p>(No one has ever been in space as long as they have. NASA will want them closely monitored for god knows how long. Probably forever.)</p><p>“Then, the beach. Or a quiet lake; maybe the Adirondacks. Anywhere beautiful and peaceful, so we can get used to Earth and gravity without tons of noise and people.”</p><p>“Mm,” Beth hums, unmoving in her eyes-closed-curled-up position. She looks a little like a contented cat. “We deserve a vacation.”</p><p><em> We </em> . They say <em> we</em>, Melissa notes. She isn’t sure why she’s surprised. Maybe because she always expected they would fall together, but didn’t expect <em> this</em>. Didn’t expect to find herself outside the med bay, discovering a relationship already deep, with a future being sketched.</p><p>Neither of them are cursory people; they both take their time, hesitate with their hearts. </p><p>So how long have they been <em> this</em>? How long has she been walking blind in her own ship?</p><p>“I blame Watney,” Chris says, but it’s accompanied by a small grin. Melissa knows he doesn’t hold any resentment toward their misplaced botanist. None of them do.</p><p>“Yeah, he’s the worst,” Beth says into Chris’s shirt. “What happens after the mountains?”</p><p>“Maine, to visit my grandpa—” (A memory hits Melissa like a wave:</p><p><em> “My grandparents raised me. My parents…they aren’t great. But my mom’s parents are amazing, and I lived with them for the most part. They love me, and they say it.” </em>)</p><p>“—so he knows I’m not still on Mars. He’s not good enough with technology to follow much of what’s been happening.”</p><p>Melissa sees Beth’s laugh more than hears it. She thinks again that she should leave, but tells herself that she needs to make sure they’re okay. (She can tell they’re okay. Or they will be. Is there a difference? Sometimes she doesn’t know.)</p><p>Really though, she wants to hear what happens after Ares III, because she has no plan, and she’s been avoiding thinking about that since they left Mars. Now, they’re going back, so she has a little more time to think; (to avoid thinking).</p><p>“And I’m going to tell him about space; about Mars, and the Hermes, and what zero-gravity feels like. Then I’m going to tell him about this girl I met, who’s the best person I know and the coolest nerd ever, and about how I want to spend my life with her, and I’m going to ask him if his offer to let me have my grandma’s ring still stands.”</p><p><em> Oh. </em> Oh, <em> god. </em></p><p>Melissa believes strictly in science, and she doesn’t really believe that emotion can make a heart skip a beat (usually, skipped heart beats=health concerns), but for a moment her chest feels incredibly heavy, and then completely weightless.</p><p>This, is another moment in which she knows she should walk away. She almost does. But a part of her needs to know. (<em>Know what, exactly? </em></p><p>She’s not sure.)</p><p>She changes her mind when Beth tilts her head up to kiss him, soft, chaste, but lingering. When she pulls away, she doesn’t go far.</p><p><em> “I love you,"  s</em>he says, the tips of her fingers brushing against his skin, starting at his temple and trailing to his jaw, to hold his head in her palm. Melissa, walking away, hears her say against his mouth:</p><p>“But if you call me a nerd while proposing I’m gonna say no.”</p><p>It’s a conversation she shouldn’t have heard. It’s a conversation that’s shifted her worldview, reminded her that there <em> will </em> be life after the Hermes. There <em> are </em> lives waiting for them back on Earth.</p><p>(She misses Robert. She may not know what job will be waiting for her after Ares III, but she knows what people will.)</p><p>There isn’t a way to know what will happen tomorrow. That can always be said. But Melissa Lewis knows: tomorrow <em> has </em> to go well, so that she can bring her crew back home and they can start those lives that are waiting. So they can see their families, or start new ones.</p><p>Watch a child start preschool, a teenage boy make the soccer team. See parents who don’t have to grieve a stranded son anymore. Listen to a 1976 original-production eight-track of <em> Abba’s Greatest Hits</em>. </p><p>Vacation on the water in the mountains, or at a beach. Get married, grow old. </p><p>Start a life; continue to live.</p><p>(And Melissa will spend the next few days trying and failing to not beam at the pair of them like a proud parent, and they will ask a few times if she’s okay when they really mean—<em>“</em><em>A</em><em>re you going crazy?” </em></p><p>She’ll say nothing about the conversation she shouldn’t have seen. They won’t know about that until later, when she’ll stand at their wedding with a glass of champagne and sparkling eyes and tell a story of falling in love in space, among the stars.</p><p>But for now, she’ll settle for:</p><p><em> “I’m happy to be alive.” </em>)</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Let me tell you, it was WEIRD writing ‘Melissa’ instead of ‘Lewis’. I wrote like half the story before realizing she probably doesn’t call herself by her surname in her head. So I used her first name. I did similar stuff with Beck/Chris and Johanssen/Beth because I wanted to show a little window of Lewis looking more at her family than her crew for a moment. Surnames felt too impersonal for this very personal scene. </p><p>Much thanks to Diane (benwvatt), who isn’t a part of this fandom but since I’m an asshole I’m dedicating this to her anyway, because she helped with the editing and she’s my biggest cheerleader. I’d probably be dead in a ditch somewhere without her around to tell me I’m a bad driver. (I don’t have a license. It was a loose metaphor.) </p><p>Anyway, thanks Diane! You’re the best and I appreciate you.</p><p>(Title is from Jacques Brel’s Ne me quitte pas.)</p></blockquote></div></div>
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